[Grad-postdoc-assn] Fwd: TP Msg. #1093 Taking Time for Baby

Mon Apr 18 19:41:32 MDT 2011

Dear all,

I thought that this post might be of interest to folks on the mailing list.

Enjoy,
Vanessa

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick Reis <reis at stanford.edu>
Date: Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 10:18 AM
Subject: TP Msg. #1093 Taking Time for Baby
To: tomorrows-professor <tomorrows-professor at lists.stanford.edu>

Now that you’ve announced your big news, do everything you can to reassure
your labmates, collaborators, and advisors that your maternity/paternity
leave will not completely disrupt your research. “If I knew, as a
supervisor, that my employee had thought through those things already and
showed that they had a plan, I’d know that there was a good possibility that
when they came back things would be very stable,” says Simmons. Lorraine
Tracey adds, “The most important thing is that you’re pregnant for nine
months. It gives you tons of time to plan experiments so that your most
important experiments are not being done while you’re not there.” Beyond
trying to get your most important work done before you duck out, here is a
checklist to help you organize your thoughts before you disappear to welcome
your new addition to the family.

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Folks:

The posting below looks at tips on how to plan for taking time off as a new
mother or father, and how to minimize the disruption to your research. The
article is by Bob Grant in The Scientist, March 1, 2011 [
http://www.the-scientist.com/toc/2011/03/], Volume 25, Issue 3, Page 64. For
more information on how to subscribe see: The Scientist - Magazine of the
Life Sciences, http://www.the-scientist.com/ © Copyright 2011, The
Scientist, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis at stanford.edu
UP NEXT: The Life and Death of Academic Freedom - Review

Tomorrow's Academic Careers

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Taking Time for Baby

Having a child changes everything. But it doesn’t necessarily have to
disrupt your research while you’re out on leave.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) postdoc Alicia Timme-Laragy was
overjoyed at the birth of her first son, Collin, in March 2008. She had made
all the preparations for his arrival and for a 10-week maternity leave from
her work in the WHOI lab of toxicologist Mark Hahn, where she studies the
response of the transcription factor NRF-2 to toxins in developing zebrafish
embryos.

But after Timme-Laragy had begun to work full-time following her maternity
leave, she realized that something was amiss. She hadn’t planned for how
exhausted and run-down she’d feel going in to work after a string of
sleepless nights and seemingly endless feedings. One day in the lab, she was
struck by one of the dizzy spells she’d been experiencing for a few weeks.
Rather than dissipating after a little while, this one continued for several
hours. Timme-Laragy and Hahn called for the on-campus medics, who
administered oxygen to the postdoc. But her dizziness persisted.

She called her doctor, who had no open appointments but advised Timme-Laragy
to seek immediate medical attention. Hahn drove her to the ER, where she
received her diagnosis: exhaustion-related dizzy spells. She had landed in
the hospital again “after a few months of being back,” in the lab,
Timme-Laragy recalls. “It was pretty intense.” She received fluids at the
emergency room and over the course of a few days recovered her strength. But
Timme-Laragy took away important lessons about how to best transition back
into the lab after maternity leave. “Part of it was not knowing what to
expect,” she admits. “I didn’t anticipate the whole mommy-brain syndrome.”

With her five-year fellowship ending in 2012, Timme-Laragy has already
submitted her first manuscript for publication. She has been working on
writing a chapter for a book to which she was invited to contribute, and has
compiled most of the data for a second paper. Last spring, she and her
husband welcomed another son, Steven, into their family. The second time
around, Timme-Laragy returned to the lab at the right pace for her—working
part-time for the first three weeks.

Having employees go on leave can create a strain in a fast-paced work
environment such as a lab. “As a PI, you want to move the work forward, and
sometimes it can be really frustrating” when team members take maternity or
paternity leaves, says Harvard immunologist Judy Lieberman. “On the other
hand,” she says, “I believe that people can only be effective when they’re
happy and doing what they want in their life.” Here are tips on how to plan
for taking time off as a new mother or father, and how to minimize the
disruption to your research.

LANDING A FAMILY-FRIENDLY POST

Whether you’re interviewing for postdoc spots or hunting for your first
faculty position, the crucial step towards successfully balancing a family
and career in science is choosing the right place to work. Though the
competition for good faculty and postdoc positions can be fierce, vetting an
institution for its flexibility toward family needs should be an important
part of your search process. You probably shouldn’t blurt out your imminent
plan to start a family during that first face-to-face interview, but here
are a few roundabout ways to get a sense of how your prospective employer
feels about maternity or paternity leave.

Ping HR

You can find out a lot about an institution’s policies on family leave
before you even get an interview with a department head or PI by searching
the Web site of its human resources department. Although federal law (the
Family and Medical Leave Act) mandates allowing up to 12 weeks of unpaid
leave for qualified employees, state regulations and institutional policies
can add to this period and alter its terms. “There are as many different
ways of handling parental leave as there are universities,” says Cathee
Johnson Phillips, executive director of the National Postdoctoral
Association. A prospective employer’s HR site is “not something that a
postdoc looking for a faculty position thinks to look at,” says Gail
Simmons, provost and VP for academic affairs at Manhattanville College in
New York. But, she continues, it could make the difference between choosing
a work environment that’s supportive and one that isn’t.

Investigate tenure policy

Academic job seekers should also familiarize themselves with institutions’
tenure policies, adds Simmons. She advises that you comb faculty handbooks
or ask questions of HR like: “Can you stop a tenure clock for a life event?”
Again, policies differ among universities, and the best way to find out
whether or not you can take time out for a new baby without seriously
damaging your chances for timely tenure is to do your homework before you
ever sit for an interview.

Stay alert on tours

Once you do get an on-campus interview, you’ll probably be taken on a tour
of the department to see the facilities and meet other faculty or employees.
Keep your eyes and ears open as you stroll about. Are there toys or
children’s books stashed in the corner of a faculty member’s office? This
may mean that they sometimes bring their children to work and that the
department is more family-friendly.

Mingle with insiders

Often, job candidates are invited out to dinner with current faculty or lab
members as a part of the interview process. This could be a crucial time to
feel out the family-friendliness of an institution, department, or lab. As
the tone gets looser and more informal, ask how many of your potential
colleagues have children, when they had them, and what their experiences
were like. “You’ve kind of got to listen to the chitchat,” Simmons says.

Engage the help of friends

Chances are you know someone now who has some kind of connection at the
place where you’re interviewing. Get your friend to ask around about
attitudes towards family leave without blowing your cover, then report back
to you.

Ask about campus child care

A major part of successfully juggling parental and career duties is finding
appropriate and convenient child-care options. Many universities and
research institutions have facilities nearby or on-site. But Simmons warns
that some child-care facilities on or near university campuses will accept
the children of students, but not those of faculty members.

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK

Once you’ve secured a fellowship or faculty position in a place that is
amenable to maternity or paternity leave, you can take steps that will
decrease the disruption your absence causes—and that may even help your own
research continue while you’re out. Here are a couple of things to implement
long before you start trying to make babies.

Make friends

Tensions and competitiveness can run high in labs, but making friends with
your colleagues right off the bat can make taking family leave a lot easier.
Daniel Gorelick, a postdoc studying how hormones affect zebrafish
development at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC,
learned this firsthand when his son, Simon, was born last year. As for many
researchers, providing constant care for his live animal subjects was a top
priority. Gorelick says it was essential for him to get on good terms with
the people in his lab, especially the lab manager and the fish technician,
so that he wouldn’t have to worry. “It’s good to make friends before you
need them,” says Gorelick.

When it was time to take her maternity leave in early February, Lorraine
Tracey, a postdoc studying drug resistance in neuroblastoma at St. Jude
Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, says she wishes she had
done a better job at building bridges. “I kind of never envisioned having to
rely so much on other people to do stuff for me,” Tracey says. “I play my
cards pretty close to my chest, and in this case, that wasn’t smart.” Tracey
adds that instead of just interacting with her labmates during scheduled lab
meetings, she should have discussed her projects with them so that she’d
feel better about their taking over certain aspects of her research, such as
performing Western blots and real-time PCR, and determining when to end
animal experiments based on measurements of tumor size.

Don’t wait, collaborate

Besides making friends within the lab, researchers set on becoming mothers
and fathers should also focus on forming collaborative connections outside
the lab. The more your project involves researchers at other institutions,
the less likely it is that your leave will negatively impact the overall
momentum of the work. Timme-Laragy says that having collaborators at Emory
University in Atlanta who do mass-spectrometry analysis of her zebrafish
tissue samples was invaluable, because she had a stack of material ready to
send to them for analysis before she went on her second maternity leave.
They were able to process the samples while she was away. Gail Simmons, of
Manhattanville College in New York, agrees that forging collaborations is a
good idea, saying that professional relationships with scientists at other
labs, and perhaps other institutions, can cushion researchers from
disruptions in research caused by illness, pregnancy, or other life events.

SO YOU’RE HAVING A BABY?

Now that you’ve announced your big news, do everything you can to reassure
your labmates, collaborators, and advisors that your maternity/paternity
leave will not completely disrupt your research. “If I knew, as a
supervisor, that my employee had thought through those things already and
showed that they had a plan, I’d know that there was a good possibility that
when they came back things would be very stable,” says Simmons. Lorraine
Tracey adds, “The most important thing is that you’re pregnant for nine
months. It gives you tons of time to plan experiments so that your most
important experiments are not being done while you’re not there.” Beyond
trying to get your most important work done before you duck out, here is a
checklist to help you organize your thoughts before you disappear to welcome
your new addition to the family.

A status report

Write out a detailed description of your research project for your advisor
and any colleagues who may lend a helping hand while you’re out. Include
details such as

• your current phase of research or writing,
• what experiments you have completed, which ones are in progress,
• which will be conducted in the future,
• any problems or challenges that have or might come up,
• estimates of how much time each of these pieces will take,
• lists of animals or plants that need to be maintained, and
• arrangements needed to help accomplish necessary tasks while you’re out.

Provide your lab or supervisor with this report a couple of months before
the due date, and present an update one month before you’re scheduled to
leave.

Copy your lab notebook

Make time to copy and distribute your lab notes and protocols to all who
might oversee your work while you’re away. Your lab notebook may contain
crucial information that could help your colleagues avoid making disastrous
mistakes in your absence. “If you’re the only one that knows all the pieces
that you do, it becomes a real arduous task to prepare” for an extended
absence from the lab, says Jody Smiley, a senior clinical analyst at City of
Hope National Medical Center in Duarte, California. But if all of your
methodologies and protocols are clearly spelled out in your lab notebook,
the people filling in for you have a template to follow.

Don’t forget teaching

If you teach or TA classes, you’ll also need to make arrangements for their
continuity while you’re out. Craft detailed syllabi and lesson plans for the
person who will be filling in for you in the lecture hall.

* * * * * * *
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-- 
Vanessa Schweizer
ASP Postdoctoral Fellow
Climate and Global Dynamics (CGD) Division &
Integrated Science Program (ISP)
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)
P.O. Box 3000 | Boulder, CO 80307 | USA

Phone: +1 (303) 497-1713
Fax: +1 (303) 497-1314
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